The Perfect Chance

Assalamu’alaikum, Wr. Wb.

I am standing here in front of you all to deliver a speech under the title “The Perfect Chance”. But before that, I want to tell you a short story.

When I was a little kid, I used to play with the kids near my house. I played many traditional games with them. Some of them, you may have already known, gobak sodor, engklek, and congklak. I had fun, even though I lost a lot. But then one day, I went out to the field near my house to play with my friends and there was no one there. At first, I thought they were late, because they were always late. So, I waited, waited, and waited but nobody came. I was left alone.

All of you may wonder what made my friends suddenly disappeared. Well, there was one thing that went very popular at that time, and it attracted kids who loved playing games. It was online games where you can have fun while sitting on a chair. Online games were brought in by the thing you call ‘globalization’.

That story is a tiny example of what globalization has brought to our beloved country. Far beyond that, globalization brought many impacts, one of them is that Indonesia’s culture is brought to the edge of extinction. People start to think that Indonesia’s cultures are out of date. People start to think that Indonesia’s fashion isn’t the modest. People start to think that Indonesia’s foods aren’t delicious. People start to think that Indonesia’s games aren’t fun. People start to think that Indonesia’s films, dramas, and acts are not interesting. They are moving to the foreign cultures that come along with globalization.

Nowadays, people start to realize the big impacts of globalization brought by globalization itself. Then, people’s opinions are changed little by little. The mindset ‘globalization is bad for Indonesia’ starts to grow.

Ladies and gentlemen,

What if we turn the facts around? Now, what do you see? Do you see a dot or something else? Most people, when they are asked to answer this question for the first time, they will answer “a black dot”. But what I see is a black dot and a piece of white paper. Let’s imagine this white paper as globalization. People usually only see the negative impact of globalization without seeing the blank space it has, without seeing its potential.

In Arab, many salesmen use Indonesian language, some of them are even using Sundanese or Javanese. Restaurants that serve Indonesian foods are also spread around Mecca, Madina, and Jeddah. In Australia, some schools have made Indonesian language as an obligatory subject in their curriculum. In Netherland, many universities provide Sundanese and Javanese language as their selectable department. In Africa, batik are widely produced and sold.

Those are a few examples for the benefit of globalization for Indonesia’s culture, and those happen without we realize it. What if we change the mindset of globalization from a threat to a perfect chance. America, China, Japan, and many more countries view globalization not only as a chance, but they already consider it as a weapon in many sections. Now it is our turn to color globalization, and stop being colored by it.

Then all of this leads to a single question, how? How do we change a threat to be a perfect chance? There are three steps at least. Starting from ourselves, to the citizens of Indonesia, and then into the world.

Ladies and gentlemen,

If now food, fashion, fun, and films around the world have invaded Indonesia and they are considered cool by many Indonesians, then we should know more. We have our own foods, our own fashions, our own acts and dramas, our own games. Fried rice and rendang have been nominated as the most delicious food in the world by Cable News Network. Wayang kulit has been claimed to be a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO. Batik has been used by many people such as Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Juliana, and even Nelson Mandela. There are many more achievements that our cultures have. These prove that our cultures are cooler and we should be proud of it. This is the first step.

Second, we must make other people know these facts. We must gather together to remind our families, our friends, the Indonesian, that Indonesia is rich of cultures. We are even richer than foreign countries. We have everything better to be proud instead of being proud of other cultures. By doing that, we can relive Indonesia’s cultures inside Indonesia.

After all of that, we can start using the chance globalization gave us. We can globalize our cultures so that Indonesia’s cultures can be renowned around the world. We can promote our cultures by showing it or even just telling a little story about Indonesia’s cultures. Through this way, Indonesia’s cultures will enter other country and Indonesia will be honored by many people around the world. 

Ladies and gentlemen,

We cannot deny or stop the globalization that has already happened in this world. Instead we should survive it or even use it as a chance to make Indonesia’s name larger in the world. I will close my speech with a quote from Marcus Garvey, “a people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Wassalamu’alaikum, Wr. Wb.